How to buy Internet faster than 1 Gbit/s and still feel cheated

By Erwin SOTIRI

Lawyer

There is a particular kind of modern optimism that deserves study. It usually appears when someone sees an Internet subscription advertised at 2.5, 5, or 8.5 Gbit/s and thinks: finally, the future has arrived. This optimism is quickly followed by disappointment, mild rage, and a speed test stubbornly refusing to cross the 940 Mbit/s mark.

This article is about that moment.

It is written for people who want Internet speeds above 1 Gbit/s and who also want those speeds to exist somewhere outside the provider’s brochure. It is not written for people who believe the Internet is “basically wi-fi” or who think a router is whatever box blinks near the TV.

If that sounds elitist, it is not. It is defensive realism.

Why a lawyer is talking about routers

You should not instinctively trust a lawyer explaining network throughput. If this were a healthy ecosystem, a lawyer would not be involved.

The reason lawyers occasionally end up discussing routers is familiar territory. Someone made promises, someone relied on them, and the footnotes were technically correct while being operationally useless. If this sounds like a prospectus problem, that is because it is.

This piece does not allege fraud, deception, or bad faith. That would require evidence. What it describes is something more common in regulated environments: a comfortable ambiguity between what is sold and what is actually delivered, bridged by silence.

The excess of optimism in “multi-gigabit Internet”

The telecom industry has discovered that “more than one gigabit” sounds futuristic enough to sell itself. And to be fair, the underlying access technology often can deliver it. Fibre-to-the-home deployments using GPON or XGS-PON are real, mature, and capable of impressive throughput.

On the provider side of the fibre, the photons are behaving impeccably. They arrive on time, in formation, and at the advertised rate.

The problem begins when the fibre reaches your building and meets the real world.

Fast Internet is not a single object

One of the great unspoken truths of networking is that “Internet speed” is not a property. It is a chain. And chains fail at their weakest link.

From the provider backbone to the fibre access network, from the fibre termination to the router, from the router to your internal network, and finally to your devices, every stage has its own limits. Above 1 Gbit/s, those limits stop being theoretical and start being very expensive.

Most people assume that once the fibre is fast, the rest is trivial. This assumption is charming but wrong.

The router everyone ignores

Let us start with the device everyone receives and almost no one questions: the ISP-supplied router.

In Luxembourg, P&T typically provides AVM Fritz!Box devices, often the Fritz!Box 7530 AX. It is a competent, stable, feature-rich router. It also has a fatal flaw if you subscribe to anything above 1 Gbit/s.

Every single ethernet port on that device is limited to 1 Gbit/s.

This is not a configuration issue. It is not a firmware limitation. It is not something that will be fixed with optimism or updates. The hardware simply cannot move more than 1 Gbit/s through any LAN port.

So if you buy a 2.5 or 5 Gbit/s connection and plug it into this router, the router calmly enforces a speed ceiling and moves on with its life. You are left admiring a number on a contract that cannot physically manifest on your network.

Orange’s situation is slightly more sophisticated.

The Livebox 7 illusion

On paper, the Livebox 7 looks like progress. It proudly displays a 10 Gbit/s ethernet port and even includes a fibre port labelled GPON or XGS-PON. This is the point where many customers relax and assume the problem has been solved.

It has not.

In real installations, the fibre almost never connects directly to the Livebox. Instead, the provider installs an external optical network terminal, (or ONT), at the point where the fibre enters the premises. This box converts the optical signal into electrical Ethernet, which then feeds the router.

The fibre port on the Livebox remains unused, quietly reminding everyone of what could have been.

Yes, the ONT connects to the Livebox using the 10 Gbit/s “FAST” port. That part works. The problem comes next. The Livebox, like many consumer routers, only offers 1 Gbit/s LAN ports for internal distribution.

At that point, the situation becomes mathematically awkward. Even if traffic were perfectly balanced across all ports, you would still cap out at 4 Gbit/s aggregate, with no single device ever seeing more than 1 Gbit/s.

An 8.5 Gbit/s subscription feeding four gigabit exits is not a performance issue. It is a contradiction.

The comforting myths of aggregation

This is usually where someone invokes link aggregation, bonding, or “simultaneous usage” as if these were incantations.

Aggregation exists. It works. It also does not do what most people think it does.

Aggregating gigabit ports does not create a faster pipe for a single device. It allows multiple independent flows to coexist more efficiently. It requires compatible hardware on both ends. It is rarely implemented properly in consumer setups.

In other words, it is not the solution to “I want to see 5 Gbit/s on my laptop”.

What actually needs to change

To make multi-gigabit Internet meaningful, the router must stop being an ornamental bottleneck.

That means it must be able to accept multi-gigabit input and distribute it over multi-gigabit outputs, while having enough processing power to route, firewall, and inspect traffic at those speeds without collapsing.

This immediately rules out most ISP-supplied devices, not because they are bad, but because they were never designed for this role.

The rare routers that do not lie

There are consumer and prosumer devices that genuinely support multi-gigabit networking.

The Fritz!Box 4690 is one such attempt. It offers a 10 Gbit/s port and a 2.5 Gbit/s port, allowing at least part of the promised speed to escape into the local network. For users already embedded in the AVM ecosystem, it is a logical upgrade, though not without trade-offs. Firmware maturity and migration complexity remain considerations.

Ubiquiti’s Cloud Gateway Fibre is less diplomatic and more honest. It offers multiple 10 Gbit/s and 2.5 Gbit/s ports, serious routing capacity, and proper network management. It does not pretend to be a home telephone exchange or a smart home hub. It is a router that routes, and it does so at speed.

You still need to know what a VLAN is or at least be willing to learn. If your networking philosophy is “plug box, forget box”, these are not the devices you are looking for.

Discovering new problems at higher speeds

Once the router problem is solved, another illusion collapses. Your internal network is almost certainly not ready.

Cabling installed a decade ago may not support sustained multi-gigabit speeds. Switches are often limited to gigabit. Wi-Fi access points advertise spectacular numbers that disintegrate the moment more than one device connects.

At this stage, the Internet connection itself becomes the least interesting part of the system. The bottleneck migrates inward, like a conservation law of disappointment.

Wi-Fi does not save you

Wi-Fi 6, 6E and recently 7 are impressive technologies, but they are not magic. Real-world throughput depends on radio conditions, client capabilities, spatial streams, and backhaul capacity.

If your access point connects to the network over a 1 Gbit/s uplink, then no amount of wireless optimism will exceed that. Multi-gigabit Wi-Fi requires multi-gigabit wired infrastructure behind it.

This is where many high-speed Internet projects quietly die.

Access speed versus usable speed

Providers sell access speed because it is measurable at their edge and easy to advertise. Users experience usable speed, which depends on everything downstream of the fibre termination.

These two numbers are related, but they are not equivalent. Above 1 Gbit/s, the difference becomes impossible to ignore.

Subscribing to Internet faster than 1 Gbit/s is easy. Using it requires intention, planning, and hardware choices your provider has no incentive to make for you.

There is no scandal here. Just an unhelpful alignment of incentives.

The fibre is usually fine. The router often is not. The internal network almost never is.

The next article will deal with internal LANs, switches, cabling, and Wi-Fi, which is where most multi-gigabit dreams are ultimately settled, often without appeal.

Until then, enjoy your ultra-fast Internet subscription. It is performing excellently somewhere. Possibly in a data centre. Possibly in a footnote.